Turf Fight A Cloud Over Aid To E. Europe

April 29, 1990|By Terry Atlas, Chicago Tribune.

WASHINGTON — Plans to help Eastern Europe deal with the environmental devastation of four decades of Communism-a toxic landscape of poisoned soil, undrinkable water and unhealthy air-are caught up in a bureaucratic dispute over which federal agency should be in charge of the American effort.

Congress is considering whether to provide as much as $100 million in environmental assistance to Eastern Europe, about a quarter of the overall U.S. aid proposed for these countries.

The Bush administration wants to strip the primary responsibility from the Environmental Protection Agency, which was authorized by Congress last year to begin a $10 million technical assistance program in Poland and Hungary. Instead, the administration wants the State Department`s Agency for International Development, the main arm for U.S. foreign aid and economic development assistance, put in charge.

But that shift is drawing criticism from some members of Congress and environmentalists, who fear that the administration will water down environmental programs in favor of other priorities such as economic development.

``In the rush to provide economic assistance to these ruined nations, it is imperative that we not commit the very mistakes that their own governments have made since World War II by choosing development at the expense of the environment,`` said Rep. Thomas Luken (D-Ohio).

In recent months, the Iron Curtain has fallen in most of Eastern Europe, revealing scenes of the world`s worst industrial pollution and the first glimpses of the tragic health consequences long denied by Communist rulers.

In Poland, for instance, the Vistula River through the capital of Warsaw is unfit even for industrial uses-too foul and corrosive from toxic chemicals and other wastes-let alone for drinking. Acid rain is eating away the stone faces on revered monuments in Krakow as a result of air pollution spewing from nearby steel mills and other factories that is reportedly 50 times above levels considered safe in the West.

Some villages in Poland`s industrialized Silesia region have recently been declared unfit to live in because of soils laden with metals-such as lead, mercury and cadmium-and chemicals that cause brain damage, birth defects and cancer. A quarter of Poland`s soil is believed to be too contaminated for safe farming.

Those in Congress who have seen the environmental tragedy in Poland and other East European nations have come home convinced that one of the most important ways for the West to help these countries is to make available the money, technology and know-how to attack the blight.

``My male relatives in Silesia die by the time they are 45 years old,``

said Sen. David Durenberger (R-Minn.).

A major international effort to help Eastern Europe is just getting underway, although the amount of money committed so far will barely begin a rehabilitation that experts say could cost tens of billions of dollars and last decades.

The Western Europeans have raced in, seeing business opportunities from the cleanup as well as benefits for their own air and water. For instance, Sweden finds it 20 times more effective to pay for cleaning up the unregulated smokestake emissions in Poland-which can blow Sweden`s way-than to tighten its own tough air pollution controls, said Michael Deland, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

The environment is also a priority for lending programs by the World Bank and the new Bank for European Reconstruction and Development, largely financed by the U.S., Western Europe and Japan. Many private groups, from Greenpeace to the United Steelworkers, are setting up programs to help.

Even so, the problems are so vast, and the threats to people so serious, that help from the U.S. and all these other sources will only begin to meet the needs, experts say.

One problem is that the new governments in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and other countries are facing so many crises that they are finding it difficult to determine what help is needed.

Poland, for instance, recently gave the U.S. and other donor nations proposals for 14 environmental projects, but only two of them were well enough developed to be serious candidates for assistance, said EPA official Gary Waxmonsky, a former science attache at the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw. The two projects are a wastewater treatment plant for Krakow and an environmental management program in a lake district in northern Poland.

Congress last year approved a $10 million down payment to enable the EPA to begin an air pollution monitoring project in Krakow and to help launch the ``Bush Center`` in Budapest, a regional environmental center that is expected to become the funnel for much of the technical environmental assistance needed in Eastern Europe. The EPA was also told to prepare a report to Congress by next January assessing the environmental problems and recommending American assistance priorities.